5.2 A Forgetting That Operates Unseen
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: 5.2 Ein Vergessen, das im Verborgenen wirkt
What is distinctive about this forgetting is that it does not announce itself loudly. It does not come as an open attack on the dignity of the human being. It creeps in — quietly, imperceptibly, often disguised as the seemingly self-evident.
This can be illustrated with an example. Imagine a society in which the conviction gradually takes hold that the worth of a human being depends on his performance. No one would say it out loud. But it shows itself in the small, everyday things: in the way people speak about the elderly, who “no longer contribute anything.” In the way the seriously ill are asked whether their life is “still worth living.” In the way unborn children are sorted according to their state of health. In the way the worth of an employee is measured by his quarterly figures.
None of these things comes with a label saying: “We are in the process of forgetting who the human being is.” But that is exactly what is happening.
This forgetting is so hard to recognize because it operates unseen. It is — to use an image — like a crack in a foundation: from the outside, the house still looks perfectly sound. But inside, something has shifted that may one day bring the whole building down.
Martin Heidegger pointed out that the Greek word for “appearance” — phenomenon — literally means: something that shows itself, something that becomes manifest.1 It is a phenomenon of a special kind, this forgetting of who the human being is: one distinguished precisely by the fact that it conceals itself. It is a hidden phenomenon — something that operates unseen and shows itself only indirectly: in its effects, in the inconsistencies it leaves behind, in the contradictions it leads to.
How do you recognize something that conceals itself? Not by looking at it directly, but by the traces it leaves behind. When a society increasingly asks whether a human life is “still worth living”; when philosophical debates seriously discuss whether certain human beings are persons and others are not; when the protection of unborn life is treated as a matter of personal preference — these are traces. Traces of a forgetting that operates unseen. The same holds when certain views of the person — such as the functionalist concept of person, which ties personhood to capacities — no longer strike us as problematic, but are taken for granted. That too is a trace. For where an error becomes self-evident, it is especially hard to recognize.
And there is a second characteristic that marks this forgetting: it is a lack. Not a lack of just anything, but the absence of something that ought to be there. Just as blindness is not simply the absence of seeing, but the loss of a capacity that properly belongs to a being, so this forgetting is not simply ignorance about the human being, but the loss of an insight that properly belongs to human cognition.
Think of a comparable situation: a musician who has lost his hearing does not simply suffer from the absence of sound. He suffers from the lack of a capacity that belongs to his essence as a musician. Something is missing that ought to be there. And this lack changes everything — his work, his self-understanding, his relationship to the world. It is similar with the forgetting of personhood: it is not simply ignorance, but the lack of an insight that belongs to being human. And this lack changes everything — how we think, how we act, how we treat one another.
For the human being is capable of recognizing the essence of the person — his own and that of others. This recognition is, in fact, among his deepest possibilities. When it is missing, something decisive is missing. Then something is wrong.
There is an apparent contradiction in this reflection: only a person can forget what a person is. An animal cannot act in oblivion of the person, because it does not even have the capacity to recognize personhood. The forgetting of personhood thus presupposes the personhood of the one who forgets. And precisely for this reason — this is the decisive point — even an action committed in oblivion of the person still reveals something of what has been forgotten. For only a person can act this way. Only a someone can forget that he is a someone.
This apparent paradox dissolves once you understand that the forgetting of personhood does not annul what the person is in reality. The person remains a person, even if she or others forget what that means. Reality is stronger than the forgetting. Yet in living and acting in oblivion of the person, a person cannot help revealing herself, by that very fact, as a person — for only a person can act and live in oblivion of the person.
But why is this forgetting so widespread today, of all times? Robert Spaemann identified a particular movement of modern thought as one essential reason:2 the division of the world into consciousness and matter, into mind and body, which goes back to Descartes. If the human being is understood only as a composite of a thinking thing and an extended thing — and if later the mind is even explained away as an illusion of matter — then the reduction of the human being to a thing is the inevitable consequence. The human being becomes a thing among things, and his personhood falls into oblivion.
Besides this root in intellectual history, however, there are also quite ordinary, everyday mechanisms that foster this forgetting. Wherever the human being is reduced to a function — to his labor power, his purchasing power, his vote in an election — the forgetting begins to operate. It takes no ill will. Often habit is enough — the daily grind, the apparent necessity of dealing with people “efficiently.” But even in the ordinariness of everyday life, the human being does not lose his dignity. And even in routine, the awareness of this must not be lost.
There is a further aspect concerning the hiddenness of this forgetting: it can happen both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes people know very well that they are using others as means — and do it anyway. Sometimes, though, it happens entirely unwittingly: someone has simply never learned, or never really understood, what it means that the other is a person. In both cases — whether conscious or unconscious — the result is the same: the person is not seen as a person. And in both cases the forgetting is a lack that can be remedied — and ought to be.
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Fußnoten
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Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927), Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993, § 7. Heidegger analyzes the Greek word “phainomenon” as “that which shows itself” and distinguishes manifest from hidden phenomena. ↩
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Spaemann, Das unsterbliche Gerücht (The Immortal Rumor) (2007), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007, pp. 26ff. Spaemann analyzes the Cartesian division of the world as a root of the oblivion of the person. ↩